Read to Me
by ardavenport
Summary: Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher have a relationship and a disagreement about reading in bed. But tragic events from long ago interrupt them.
1. Chapter 1

** READ TO ME**

by ardavenport

* * *

><p><strong>*-*-* *-*-* Part 1<strong>

Thump!

Picard started awake. The bedroom lights were up. He saw blue to his right, and up. Beverly Crusher stood at his shoulder, holding his book up above him.

"Why do you do this?" she demanded. "If you're tired, why don't you just go to sleep?"

"What?" He stared up at her, surprised.

"Why do you have to fall asleep with a book in your hands? Just put it down and turn the light off."

Annoyed by this sudden imposition, he propped himself up on his elbows. "I didn't know it bothered you so much."

She waved the book, her arms falling to her sides. "It doesn't bother me," she denied. "It's just so...pointless that you do it all the time."

He squinted up at her and wondered why she seemed so upset about something so trivial and that perhaps there was more at the heart of her mood than just his sleeping habits.

"How's Doctor Selar?"

Crusher's shoulder's slumped, her defiant stance diminishing. She sat down on the bed next to him, the book sliding between her knees. "Still in a healing trance. And so are all the others."

"Hmm." Picard pulled himself back, sitting against the pillows. "I would have hoped for some kind of change by now."

Crusher sighed. "There were some physiological responses in all of them when you were all affected on the bridge. Increased heart rate, body temperature. But there hasn't been any kind of change since then." Picard nodded. She'd reported those when they'd happened, so he already knew about them, but he was disappointed that there was nothing new.

She sat with her head bowed, her red hair tinted a brighter shade of crimson from the glow through the view port from the world the _Enterprise_ orbited. Picard laid his hand on her thigh, caressing it.

"Long night?" he asked. He didn't know the time, but it had been late when he'd last spoken to Commander Data about their latest unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the beings on Plasset IV below them. And then he'd returned to his quarters to find the doctor not there, so he'd settled in, reading in bed, to wait for her. They'd been sharing quarters for a couple of months and he'd gotten used to seeing her there when he went to bed.

"Yes," she replied with a tired edge to her voice. "Aside from having nine comatose Vulcans in Sickbay, we've been up to our eyeballs in petty emergencies all night."

"Oh?"

"Yes. The first thing that happened was a couple who burned themselves in the shower. I don't know what they were doing, they won't say a word about it, but they both had second degree burns on the lower parts of their bodies. Then security brought in three people from down in Engineering. I think that new replicator specialist brought aboard a new recipe for Romulan ale and they'd been trying it out."

"What?" the captain demanded. "Which replicator specialist?"

"Uuuuh, Dorias, I think, the one with the blue hair." Picard barely remembered her. She was a civilian and had only come aboard at their last stop on Caius VI. She couldn't leave any earlier than their stop at Starbase 219, unless other transport could be arranged sooner. Picard had complete authority about who stayed on the _Enterprise_, and he was not going put up with this kind of thing on his ship, especially when they were in the middle of a mission. Crusher noted the severe look on his face.

"Oh don't look so offended. Every replicator specialist and transporter chief I've ever known has had an illegal pattern for Romulan ale."

"Not aboard my ship." Crusher let it go. She knew perfectly well that Picard, in his much younger years, had indulged in similarly forbidden fruits and she thought that his present righteousness was a bit overplayed. But after having to deal with three drunken, vomiting technicians earlier that evening, she was just as happy to hand them over to the captain's displeasure.

"Well, after that," she continued, "Kragaz came in with his pet cat." Picard remembered the small, Juran astro-biologist. He'd spoken with the scientist a couple of times about their current situation. Kragaz had come aboard at the same time as the blue-haired Dorias. "It was in heat. And Kragaz had never had an Earth cat before and he had no idea what was wrong with it."

"What? It's fertility should have been regulated before he brought it aboard the ship. Why wasn't it checked?"

"He was supposed to have brought it in with him when he came in for his physical, but he forgot. I've been reminding him for the past two weeks about it. He didn't get around to it until something went wrong tonight."

"You let it go for two weeks?" the captain demanded.

"Yes," Crusher answered crossly. "All Kragaz's records _said_ that his animal had been checked out and that he'd read all the requisite material about it's care. And I didn't think it was important enough to send Worf down to have it confiscated." Her words sounded overly angry even to Crusher. She suddenly wondered if she would have been so quick to snap back at him if she weren't sitting on his bed, looking at him in his pajamas, a nesting of plants behind his pillow and the light from that hellish-colored planet glowing through the view ports behind him. Her reply to him now seemed too close to bickering. His hand still rested on her leg.

"Anyway," she went on, "that cat got away from us, and that thing was yowling and shedding and shitting all over my Sickbay for twenty minutes before we got it into a cage. We all got phaser stuns on our shins trying to catch it." She brought up one of her long legs and rubbed an ankle for emphasis. Picard's expression lightened as he pictured what must have gone on down in Sickbay and as he watched her massage a shapely leg, just above her boot.

"Sounds like quite a night." Crusher nodded back to him, feeling tired. Then she told him about the boy who'd stuck a pin in his little sister, the plant physiologist with the rash, and that Troi, Bosh and Herman, the three strongest telepaths/empaths on the ship (aside from the unconscious Vulcans), had come in with new headaches.

"I don't know, Jean-Luc, if I didn't know any better, I'd swear the full moon was out." She looked back at him, and then out at the red light from Plasset IV in the view port. "Jean-Luc, how long are we going to stay here?"

Picard sighed. "I suppose until we're able to communicate with what's down there." Crusher hung her head, knowing that would be his answer and wondering why she'd bothered to ask.

"Jean-Luc, Selar and the others can't stay in a healing trance forever."

"Is their condition deteriorating?"

"No, but it's starting to get to Troi, and any other telepath or empath on the ship. We've been here for days, we're still not any closer to talking to whatever that is out there, and I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it."

"Selar and the others seemed to think it was."

"That there are Vulcans down there? There's nothing down there but hydrogen and trace organic compounds." She gestured toward the planet.

"Not Vulcans, their katra." He used the Vulcan term for what Beverly Crusher had been told corresponded to souls...or ghosts. He extended his hand to her and she took it, his large fingers gently enfolding hers. "We're sure that a ship went down on Plasset. We're not sure which one; one of the science academy ships, or the starship. But from what Selar, T'Sen and Seib told us, and from what we've been seeing from the planet, and from Troi, and from your our analyses, Doctor, we know that there's _something_ alive and intelligent down there that knows what happened and it's been trying to communicate with us almost since the moment we arrived. Now we have an obligation to try to answer."

"I'm beginning to wonder how much this thing could affect the other people on this ship." His other hand closed over hers.

"Have you seen any evidence of that?" Picard reminded her of the _Enterprise_'s previous encounters with shipwide telepathic mis-communication.

"No," Crusher admitted. "But...I just have this feeling, especially today, that whatever's down there might be getting impatient and is going to try things that aren't as benign as painting pictures in clouds." The expression on Picard's face was not sympathetic toward her inarticulate misgivings. "They certainly got through on the bridge today."

"That was only an illusion," Picard reassured her. "Commander Data was completely unaffected. Nothing showed up on the sensors, and it wasn't even a complete illusion. It was more like a memory." He paused, momentarily trying recapture it. "I can't even remember what it looked like, not even the shapes. But it was the bridge of another ship; I'm sure of that."

"In red mist," she added, inclining her head toward the view port. His eyes flicked in that direction. She freed her hand from his and laid it on his leg. "Whatever killed that other ship, what's to keep it from reaching up and pulling us down as well? You know how overwhelming illusions can be, how easy it can be to manipulate reality. You don't need any kind of weapon when you can do that."

"If they wanted to do that, they would have done it days ago."

"Maybe they just haven't gotten around to it."

"Beverly, I don't understand how you can calmly suggest that we simply leave, when we clearly have a duty to not only investigate what happened, but to communicate with a new life form. That is the very essence of the mission of this ship." Crusher looked away, knowing that she'd lost the discussion even before she'd spoken. If they couldn't investigate this mystery, then what was the point of having a starship at all? She thought about her own trepidations that seemed to have been building up all evening. She remembered Selar and the other Vulcans, three of them children, almost simultaneously having nervous breakdowns when the attempts to communicate had started up from Plasset IV. The only thread of sanity that they'd been able to hang onto was the knowledge that the horror, the dread that they all felt came from the planet below and not from some sudden lack of inner control...and that the source was somehow Vulcan, from some past tragedy that had now resurrected itself to reach out to them. Crusher remembered Selar and T'Sen, hunched over and clutching their bodies as if they were naked, as they told her, Troi and Picard what they felt. Red mist; they all said they saw everything through red mist and that they felt it creeping into their bodies though no medical scan revealed anything more serious than severe stress. After a day of this even Selar's constitution couldn't take the constant turmoil, the desperate need to find its source, and they had all retreated to within themselves. If they could not regain their logic and emotional control while the _Enterprise_ crew searched for the source of their distress, they would endure the storm in oblivion.

Crusher sighed. Picard was still looking at her, waiting for an answer. "I'm sorry, I know we have to try to find out what happened. It's just...how much suffering do we need to go through for it?" Even distraught, Selar and the others had been adamant that the _Enterprise_ find out what had happened and what was on the planet. And if they just left, Vulcan would petition Starfleet to send another ship, or even send their own ships, if it came to that. "I don't know, maybe I'm just tired."

"Hmm, well perhaps you should take a break. Read a book," Picard suggested, happy to move on from such a pointless discussion.

Crusher looked down at the book she'd taken from him when she'd come in and found him sleeping with it lying on his chest. Her finger still held the place where it had been open. She read the title. "Flowers of Despair, by Elis Jan." She'd seen him reading it the past week. It was the biography of a Bajoran who had died during the Cardassian occupation of her planet. "Oh, yes, this will take my mind off my worries. Cheer me right up."

"It's not as grim as you might think. And it helps me a great deal to take a break from whatever problem I might be working on with something completely different. It gives me a fresher perspective when I come back to it."

She smiled. "I can't read this. It'll only put you to sleep anyway."

He scowled at her. "It will not."

"Jean-Luc, you always fall asleep whenever I read to you."

"Oh, really?" He crossed his arms over his chest.

Crusher raised her eyebrows at him. "All right." She brought her other leg up and sat cross-legged on the bed next to him, her behind resting against his leg. She opened the book.

_I had come a long way to the Lorha Valley. The sun had grown cold, the sky gray as the skins of the invaders. The plants withered, sickened from their poisons. The pagh of the whole world had paled and run colorless, leeched out by the takers in this place. I had come very near to the places of the first invasion, where they had landed their first predator's claw on our world._

_Real uplifting stuff, Jean-Luc, Crusher thought to herself._

_I stayed with cousins of my step-daughter. They did not know me; I did not know them, but the whole world seemed full of strangers, so what did it matter? In the night, we lit fires and huddled about them for warmth. Our cities, our powers of light and dark had already become mere legend to our younger children, mysteries that were controlled by the gray outsiders, not their parents._

_But for all the outward signs of poverty, this camp was better than others I saw, the clothes of the people less shabby, their tools seemed cleaner and better kept. It was many days before I found the reason, by accident, for they would not have willingly revealed their secret..._

Picard listened. Crusher had started in at the top of a page he'd already read. Perhaps, he thought, the book was a bit grim after all. He had to admit that he had fallen asleep at a point in Elis Jan's wanderings when he seemed to be getting near to finding what had happened to his mother and her followers. In spite of the advice that he'd just given to Beverly Crusher, he found it hard to concentrate on a historical mystery when the _Enterprise_ was probing into a real and present one.

Which ship was it? The _Z'Kaz_, the _X'mon_? Or was it the starship, _Excalibur_? The first two had been explorers from the Vulcan Science Academy, each with a crew of around sixty, and both missing for over fifty years; the _Excalibur_ had been gone for nearly a hundred. Half the _Excalibur_'s crew had been Vulcan, half Human, with over 400 people in all. There were hundreds, thousands of reasons why a ship could disappear. Hundreds, thousands of ships had gone missing over time, strayed beyond the well known spaceways within the Federation. There had never been any way of keeping them in, the Federation had never even tried.. Explorers, settlers, fortune-hunters; Starfleet provided some semblance of order (for the few who wanted it) and organized exploration. But plenty of Starfleet vessels disappeared as well.

Now something on Plasset IV was calling out to them with the answer to one of these mysteries. They just had to translate what was being said, by empathy, by illusion, by shapes in the clouds of the red gas giant planet. Their simple planet survey had turned into a quest as soon as the Vulcans on the _Enterprise_ had fallen from the formless, disembodied cry that was trapped on Plasset. Soon after that the tainted hydrogen clouds had taken on rough shapes, strange twisting things that rose high above the atmosphere, but they never came within a hundred kilometers of the starship watching them. The science departments had spent days trying to interpret it and presumably the beings on Plasset were doing the same for the replies that were sent back. The illusions on the bridge had been the first real breakthrough they'd had.

Red shapes, like the ones in the atmosphere had appeared on the bridge. Eyes closed, Picard recalled them clearly. He'd been struggling all afternoon to remember them, fighting with the wispy tendrils of the recollection of illusion. Now it flowed to him as he lay in his bed, the single-hued redness taking shape, acquiring form and shadows.

A voice. A woman's voice...Beverly Crusher's. She was reading something, wasn't she? What was it? Picard listened to the sound of it...

_"Captain's log: stardate 3417.2.: We have been orbiting Plasset IV for three days now and we are now positive that there is intelligent life here. Science officer T'Kar and Mr. Saren have catalogued thousands of shapes and patterns, but we have been unable to decipher them. The probes we sent into the atmosphere have all ceased functioning now. T'Kar believes that the beings on Plasset have taken them. The signals we received for the last ones were very strange. The first ones just disappeared. But on these last probes, vital systems shut down first, failures that should have either completely disabled or destroyed them. The data we received from them was corrupted with other signals, not just static. We haven't been able to decipher these patterns any better than the others, but..."_

/Red alert./

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><p><strong>*-*-* *-*-* End Part 1<strong>


	2. Chapter 2

** READ TO ME**

by ardavenport

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><p><strong>*-*-* *-*-* Part 2<strong>

Picard's eyes snapped open, his whole body tense. A second went by...and then another.

Waiting.

But the red alert klaxon did not resound again. Had he really heard it? Or had he just felt it? His eyes were drawn to Beverly Crusher's pale face, the redness of her lips and her hair gone dark in the strange glare behind him. He turned his head. He sat up, his whole body turning, the blanket rustling away from him with the rapidity of his movements.

The view port was filled with red.

For a moment, Picard had the horrible sense of falling, vertigo, as if the ship were plunging down into the clouds. He drew back. He heard Crusher gasp. But no, he caught himself. Falling? The whole ship? Not likely.

"Picard to bridge!"

"Commander Data here."

"Status!" Picard demanded.

In the command chair, on the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Data cocked his head. The captain was obviously shouting. The android looked about the peaceful, low-light level, third shift bridge. The ensign at the helm station in front of him was testing out a simulation. The readouts in the arm rests of the command chair were unremarkable. The red planet on the view screen remained where it was.

"All ship's stations report normal," Data answered. "Has something-"

"Report to my quarters, Mister Data. And send Counselor Troi as well."

"Acknowledged."

"Beverly, it isn't real." He seized her by the shoulders and forced her to look away from the window and toward him. Her eyes were squeezed shut.

"I know, it's not real. It's...not...real," she hissed back to herself as much as to him. "Ahh..." It was a stifled cry of panic. Picard clinched his teeth, his grip tightened on her. This illusion was more real than the one earlier on the bridge. That one had been essentially only visual. It was little trouble to discount an illusion that did not match the sound and feel of the other senses-not even up to the standards of the _Enterprise_'s holodeck.

But the air had turned cold and Picard could hear the faint sound of wind. He knew that it had to be an illusion if there was a breeze picking up in his quarters. But there was something else...Picard felt as if he'd walked into a dark, eerie room that he'd never been in before. Trepidation, instinct; the same emotions showed on Beverly Crusher's pale face.

Picard got up off the bed, dragging Crusher with him."It isn't real!" he repeated.

"I know!" She opened her eyes and glared back at him. His fingers were digging into her biceps; that was real. She could hear an evil sounding wind rising; that was not real. "But, I-I was reading, but it-it wasn't...wasn't what I was reading." She looked down.

The book, forgotten, had fallen to the floor. Picard picked it up and turned back to the view port. There were shapes in the redness, its light expanding beyond the boundaries of the view port, stretching up and down on the bulkhead. He stepped back from it. Crusher stayed frozen in place and he grabbed her arm and pulled her with him.

"It's trying to communicate. It's...them, they're trying to get through," Crusher gasped, her face close to his ear. He looked past her at the expanding red. The wind definitely felt real on his skin, but Crusher's hair was unmoved by it. Picard looked down at the book. Holding it in one hand, he opened it, flipping through the pages. He stared at the print on the pages, but it was meaningless to him. Feeling cheated, he stared harder, but the ruddy light played tricks on his eyes and the symbols jumped around on the pages.

It was getting to him; he could feel an irrational, primal fear creeping over him. He dropped the book and backed out of the bedroom, Crusher clinging close to him. The bulkhead in the main room was almost entirely red. Crusher clutched at the material of his pajamas.

"Can you hear it?" she whispered.

"What?" Picard heard nothing, or was that...

"Voices...it's them." Crusher turned her head, looking over her shoulder at the wall of bright ruby mist. Her wide eyes had no color, her face and the objects in the room divided between the light and deep, deep shadow. Picard froze, listening. He could just hear...

Whoosh.

Picard whirled about; Crusher gasped. Shapes were coming through the open door. Someone was supposed to have come...but who? Picard tried to remember, but names and reasons slipped away from him.

"It's them," Crusher said, still close to him.

"No." Unidentifiable bodies filed in through the portal and shuffled sideways along the walls. "It's not real," he hissed back to her, trying to gain control of the situation. The captain closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. The air smelled cool and fresh, but inhaling it didn't clear his mind. He felt invaded, naked, exposed to...he didn't know what. Picard shook his head, opening his eyes. His thoughts were a jumble, but he knew that what he was seeing and now feeling, was not his reality.

He heard voices...

/Red Alert!/ The red alert klaxon sounded, shrill and insistent. The lights changed, a new blinking crimson added to the red.

/Report, Mr Saren!/ His voice? No, the **captain's** voice. Picard looked to the right and left, at the bridge he now stood on. But it was just an outline, superimposed over his quarters and the people in it, people lining the walls, filling the room, still silently filing in through the door. Crusher stood close to him. He had his arms around her and he could feel her shaking. When had he put his arms around her?

/We have been enveloped by the planet's atmosphere./

/From a 20 kilometer orbit?/

This was what had happened...to the _Excalibur_. They were seeing what had happened to that starship. Picard felt a horrible dread in the pit of his stomach. He knew that what would happen would be terrible, but he didn't know the events. And the people in the room were...witnesses. The crew, the dead had come out see the story told.

/Mr. T'Gara, we need warp power!/ The captain...Ryder commanded to her chief engineer over the comm. But it wasn't her voice...it was Crusher's.

/Captain, we cannot go into warp in this atmosphere. The ship would be destroyed./ Someone else, one of the witnesses, spoke, but they were actually Lieutenant Commander Saren's words. The large Vulcan, the first officer, stepped down from the science station to deliver these words. Picard saw him through Ryder's eyes; black pants, gold shirt, gold braid on the sleeve-a very old style uniform. Saren's graying bangs cut evenly across his forehead, his thick eyebrows like caterpillars, his lined face-Ryder thought he was the ugliest Vulcan she'd ever known. That had been her thought the first time she'd met him. And it was the first time Picard had seen him so that thought emerged to him through her memory.

Picard found himself sitting at navigation station, in front of the command chair, seeing the view screen through Ensign Polinov's eyes. The controls had frozen up. He laid in courses to break orbit with no result. The first flick of panic touched Polinov. His first watch on the bridge, a room full of Vulcans peering down at his least little mistake had been a pale dry run for this. Polinov knew he would never find these officers intimidating after this. Never again.

Lieutenant Grennis at the helm was all experience. No other thoughts touched her mind other than what she was doing at that moment. She tried boosting the ship out of orbit, but the old-fashioned indicator light displays showed a rapidly decaying orbit. There should have been a change, a perceptible surge of power from the engines, a rising sound through the frame of the ship that would mean they were escaping...but there was nothing, only cold silence, a deathly stillness around them. They were sinking, like a ship on an ocean of quicksand. The sound of the red alert was drowned out by the silence. The stars on the view screen had been completely obliterated by the red.

/The helm isn't responding! We're not getting anything from the engines!/ Picard's own voice, joined with a few others in the room, reported back with Grennis's words to her captain.

/Mr. T'Gara, we've lost engine power! We need engine power, now!/ Ryder could see the display at the helm station before her. Her fingers tightened on the square arms of the command chair. Saren had gone back to his post.

Picard tightened his arms around Crusher, one arm circling her waist, the other around her shoulder.

"This isn't real." Picard lips were close to her ear. Crusher realized that she was standing like a statue, her arms at her sides. She lifted her forearms and clumsily lay her arms over the waist of his pajamas. "Beverly, this isn't real!" he repeated low and hoarse, but with more intensity. His voice was shaking.

"I know it's not real!" she answered back to his ear. He faced away from red-filled view screen of the ghostly starship bridge. She honestly couldn't think of where the imaginary ship and the real one began or ended. The piece of floor they stood on was bare in the blood red light, but beyond that ring of emptiness they were surrounded by people-a crowd, an audience in the maroon shadows. "Listen!" she told him, her arms now wrapped tight around his middle. He stiffened, raising his head.

A faint chorus of cries, surprise, horror, shock, rose on the imaginary wind. Beverly Crusher felt Jean-Luc Picard's slender body press close to hers, his breath on her cheek. But she could also feel herself through Captain Patsy Ryder's body, sitting tense in her command chair; ship losing power, Polinov and Grennis at the helm before her, unable to stop their descent into...what? Crusher could feel herself through Ensign Saion at the communications station behind Ryder. He called out damage reports all over the ship, prioritizing them, fielding them to engineering and life support. The lights at his station flashed and winked patterns that meant something to him. And then they all went out.

The young Vulcan froze. Crusher gasped as she felt the change, a whole body chill that Saion felt within himself. The voices on the bridge stopped.

Crusher's head shook, back and forth, hurting her neck. Picard was shaking her.

"Stop it! Beverly we've got to get out of here." He stopped shaking her and she stared back at him. His face was angry, real and solid. She touched it. He ignored her probing fingers and looked about them for a way out, but they were trapped from behind and to the sides by the people around them, just out of reach, just outside their circle of red light. In front of them was mist, red and opaque. A shape formed there and Crusher fixed her eyes on it.

"Jean-Luc." She drew his attention, her hands now resting on his shoulders. A ship formed before them. A shape, an old Constitution class starship sank into the dense red atmosphere. A glow surrounded it, and a ghostly copy separated from it. Then another, and another. Then there was a dozen of them. Two dozen. The original bleeding off copies of itself and subtly losing the definition of its own detail as it did so. The number of copies grew. They were different sizes and now there were so many of them that they overlapped. And still more of them peeled away from the _Excalibur,_ even faster than before.

"NO!" Picard waded forward into it, his arms swinging, thrashing at the image, tearing it apart. He stumbled. The images reformed around him. He cried out, suddenly lost in the middle of it, the original starship image now buried amidst the ghostly copies that were now spawning twisted and corrupted copies of themselves.

"Jean-Luc!" Crusher dove forward, her arms sinking deep into the boiling images. Her fingers closed on fabric, an arm. She tugged, and then pulled harder. The arm resisted, pulling back, throwing her off balance, almost dragging her into the growing mass. The newer images were now all twisted, pink and bloody, the nearest opaque surface two centimeters from her face, She panicked and cried out as she felt herself being pulled in.

She regained her footing; her feet firm on the deck, she fell backward, using her own weight to pull with.

Picard came free suddenly. He burst out of the images like a bird from a cloud and they both toppled back from the ghostly mass. It was huge, seething and misshapen, stretching from floor and up, up beyond the ceiling. It looked like a cloud, a big, violent thunderhead. Ships looking like a cloud, or a cloud looking like ships? Picard was trying to climb off of her, clumsily jabbering her with his knees and elbows. She tried to roll away, but that only made it worse. He whimpered, a gasp of horror. She grabbed onto him, pulling herself up.

The illusion of the old style starship bridge had completely disappeared. But the sense of people around them was overwhelming. When the ship had divided into the pale copies of itself, the same thing had happened to the people aboard her. Split into thin layers, multitudes of copies of what they'd been, their presence smothered Crusher. Her face was hot, sweat forming on her skin, under her clothes. The wind had died into a stifling atmosphere and the sound of it had turned into their voices, an awful moaning sound.

Picard, gasping in the thick air, pushed himself up from his hands and knees and sat up, his body leaning to the side. He began to speak. Others voices around them joined in, reading the same litany.

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><p><strong>*-*-* *-*-* End Part 2<strong>


	3. Chapter 3

** READ TO ME**

by ardavenport

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><p><strong>*-*-* *-*-* Part 3<strong>

"Captain's log; I don't know...stardate gone. We're dead. This world has life and it took us, pulled us in. It doesn't know what death is...well, it didn't. Now our deaths are all over this world, like an echo, over and over and over again. I can feel parts of myself all over the ship; inside it, inside...other people. And they're in me." Picard gasped. Whimpering and sobs answered him.

"There is no more ship anymore..." Picard and the other voices continued. "...but there is. It's here..and there...and there." Picard's voice rose to a hysterical falsetto. The mist had flowed in around them, the outlines of the people faint in the deepening shadow. "Oooooh, Saren, T'Gara, T'Perin, Syoz, Sulis, T'Kar you keep trying to meld yourselves together, and it's not working. There isn't enough left. We're not real anymore!" He threw his arms wide, his face tilted to the red clouds above. Tears ran down the sides of his cheeks. Other voices in the mist sobbed the same words, muffled in the darkening fog. "Just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy...just a memory of what it was like to have a body, to breathe..air. The beings on this world didn't know..."

"...and now they'll never forget."

Crusher's could feel them fading away. Picard sat on his empty spot on the floor in the dimming light. But no, the light wasn't going, it was just losing its color. The intense red blurred into pink and pastel and then colorless gray. The shadows lost their sharpness, their depth.

Picard blinked in the light and looked down at his bare knees. His legs were curled up under him. The plain room lighting was like daylight...or dawn. He caught himself from falling over and looked about him.

He sat on the carpeted floor of his cabin. And it was completely filled with people. Doctor Crusher sat next to him. She ran a hand through her disarrayed hair, the only bit of redness left. Picard almost reached up to touch it.

But except for their small patch of floor, less than a meter square, the entire volume around them was filled with people, bodies and arms and legs and bewildered faces.

Someone in that living mass of bodies must have realized just then that he was whole and alive after all and he let out a huge whoop for joy, which was followed by a series of complaints.

"Picard to Bridge." the captain called out to the ship's comm system.

"Commander Data here," came back the calm response. A child, buried somewhere in the crowd started to cry. And then another one started. And then a baby wailed. Everyone was beginning to move and shift position, testing their boundaries, which were pretty confined. A general mumble rose in the room but it shushed silent when the captain spoke again.

"Status, Commander Data."

"The ship is functioning on automatic. Our orbit is steady. All stations are unmanned, except for the bridge. Nearly the entire crew seems to be...in your quarters, sir."

"Yes, I can see that." Someone on the sofa behind him moved and a foot poked him in the back. He briefly glared back at it over his shoulder, but not toward the person who'd done it. There wasn't any way he could have singled out who it was out of the dozen or so bodied tangled there.

"Set course for the Gerhanis system, warp 3 and engage, Mister Data."

"Sir?" Data cocked his head. It was highly irregular and against standard operating procedures to initiate warp without a bridge crew if one were available.

"Get us away from this planet, Mister Data."

Data cocked his head again, interpreting Picard's tone. "Understood, sir."

"Picard out."

On the bridge, the android looked to the Vulcan seated next to him. Selar's whole body was tense, her eyes tightly shut, her face strained. He'd met up with her outside Captain Picard's quarters, where the shipwide mass hallucination had converged. Unable to see the illusion and unwilling to forcibly immobilize the entire crew without more information on what was affecting them, Data had settled for taking Selar from the crowd. The captain had been completely inaccessible by the time Data had gotten there. The density of people in the room prevented even the use of the transporter.

Once away from the center of the illusion-the phenomenon did seem to be spatially localized-Selar was able to tell him the content of what was affecting the crew.

Data noted Selar's posture relax as he set the ship's course and ordered the computer to take the _Enterprise_ out of orbit. She exhaled, her face going slack.

"It is passed," the doctor finally announced. "They are gone." She opened her dark eyes, and they were every bit as calm and rational as the yellow ones of her android commanding officer.

"You are recovered?" Data inquired. He did not attempt any more than a moderately concerned expression. The pridefully unemotional Vulcan would be find anything more unnecessary. Selar nodded back to him.

"Then I believe you will be needed in Sickbay, Doctor." Data looked down at the tiny display in the arm of the command chair. The ship's internal sensors showed that the crowd was breaking up, but there were still over 900 people in the captain's cabin.

Down in Picard's cabin, Crusher looked about her. There were people pressed up next to each other, and under the tables and desk and chairs with more people piled up on top of those. Both doors were open, and people were already filing out, but there were just so many of them, that the rooms were still filled way beyond capacity. Picard was standing, helping a woman in a long purple night shirt to stand. He was still only wearing his very short, gray pajamas with their short sleeves and his chest half exposed.

Crusher got up. The bare patch of floor that she and Picard had been in was filling up as she helped a man wearing just a pair of shorts and a woman with a towel wrapped around her up off the other bodies on the sofa. She thought about taking off her medical jacket and gallantly handing it over her half-naked captain, but she knew he wouldn't accept. There were so many other people who'd been in bed or preparing for it when they were drawn into this that the captain's attire didn't really stand out.

The captain helped two more people up, an ensign in uniform who kept her eyes pointed toward the deck and a paunchy man wearing nothing but a pair of bright orange shorts.

"Hmm, we're going to have a lot of those in Sickbay." Picard turned around at the sound of Crusher's voice. She stood behind him looking down at his sore and now bruising ankles.

"Humph," Picard nodded. "Is anyone injured?" he called out to the room. It moaned back at him. "Is anyone injured?"

"Only my pride!" an unidentified female voice by the replicator answered. Picard scowled in the wisecracker's direction, but the mob gave her impenetrable anonymity. Unless he remembered her voice. Someone near her shushed her. More people grumbled. Someone had a sprained arm and another had trampled fingers. And the baby was crying louder.

"Any injuries should report to Sickbay!" Crusher called out. "As soon as we get out of here," she muttered to herself. Everyone around them was standing and the mass of people was herding itself toward the exits. The crowd noise in the room increased, people finding each other, complaining about who was stepping on who.

"Captain!" Picard looked toward the bedroom, where Commander Riker's voice was coming from.

"Commander?" This was Lieutenant Commander LaForge, further back in the bedroom. Picard tried to look over the heads of the people in the way but neither LaForge nor Riker were visible. Someone at the other end of the cabin cried out and then something crashed to the floor. Picard whirled about, craning his neck to see what might have been broken, but it was hopeless to see around the crowd in that direction as well. He sighed and called back to Riker and LaForge to wait until the room was more cleared out. The wall of bodies between where he stood and the door had gained some mobility as the room emptied at a faster rate. Someone snarled and Picard supposed that his Klingon security chief was somewhere under the dining table

The captain impatiently waited for his crew to vacate his cabin. All around him, young officers, older officers, scientists, ship support personnel and everyone else conspicuously averted their eyes away from him. It wasn't really anyone's fault that they were in the captain's private cabin; the entire crew was guilty of this trespass. But Picard was impatient to see them all gone anyway.

"Captain?" Picard saw Counselor Deanna Troi squeezing her way through the crowd. Picard extended his hand toward her and the crowd parted a bit to let her pass through. Behind her was T'Sen, looking worn and...frightened.

"Counselor," he greeted them. He nodded toward T'Sen, ignoring her wide-eyed stare. The Vulcan responded to his neutral expression; her narrow shoulders squared, her head bowed, her eyes briefly closed before she looked up again at the captain.

"They are gone," she announced in a rough, near-whisper. Her long, steel-gray hair, normally styled and piled on her head, hung down over her shoulders and down her chest, over the blue, Sickbay pajamas she wore. She must have come out of her healing trance and been draw into...Picard didn't know what to call it. A mass hallucination? Or mass communication?

"Was that really...the crew of the _Excalibur_?" The captain asked.

T'Sen returned a quick head shake negative. "No, it was not them. It was...derived from them, but it was of the planet. The...beings of that world exist in a multitude of forms, simultaneously. They did not understand the rigidity of our form. So, they did not know that they were killing them when it changed their form. They died...badly. In terror, in despair. All of them. All of them becoming part of all things around them. Alien. Strange. Lost."

Picard saw Counselor Troi next to him tense, her black eyes on T'Sen. T'Sen's eyes looked down around Picard's middle. The parched emotion that he thought he heard in her voice seemed to be mirrored in the empathic counselor. T'Sen's eyes flicked up to his face.

"I must meditate on this, Captain, before I can...evaluate it."

"Of course. You may wish to work with Doctor Selar and the others for your report." T'Sen nodded to him and turned away. The room had cleared out considerably and a space had cleared out around them. She looked so small and old as she joined the crowd, creeping toward the door. Suddenly, T'Sen whirled back to him

"No ship must ever return to that world. Ever."

Then T'Sen turned away again. Picard and Troi watched her back as she mixed in the with the people around her. It looked like there weren't any more than 200 people left, slowly creeping toward the exits, waiting their turn to be gone.

Picard could actually see the far end of the room where Lieutenant Worf and a couple of his security people (one of them out of uniform) were herding people around the dining table and toward the door. Two of the chairs lay on their sides next to the table. The fruit bowl was turned over and its contents scattered and squashed on the floor.

"Captain?" Riker emerged from the bedroom. He'd been on duty and he was in uniform thought his hair was a mess. Lieutenant Commander LaForge wore only a pair of light blue, drawstring pants.

"What a ride," LaForge commented and then stepped aside for a trio of women in nightshirts, their eyes conspicuously turned away from Picard as they exited the bedroom.

"Are you all right, Captain?" the first officer asked. Picard nodded.

"You?" he asked and Riker nodded back and glanced toward the couple dozen or so people limping out after him. Crusher stepped forward to help a man who was favoring his left leg.

"I'll be in Sickbay." Crusher joined the exodus out of the room.

"You'd better get back up to the bridge, Number One and help out Mister Data. I'll join you as soon as I've," Picard looked about him,"cleaned up here." Riker nodded and he and LaForge left.

It took him an hour of picking things and pieces of things up, making the bed and righting the furniture. He called the bridge once while he was working, but there wasn't anything that demanded his immediate attention. When he'd finished, the room still didn't look right. It didn't smell right after all those bodies had been in it and fruit crushed into the carpet. He ordered the ship's computer to filter the air in his quarters and went to shower and dress.

On the bridge, he checked the Sickbay reports and Riker's duty roster, rearranged around the night's disruption and the people who had been injured. The ship itself had not been affected at all while its crew had converged on the hallucination. But Engineering had scheduled a maintenance check on the life support systems in the section where Picard's quarters were located, just in case any of them had been overstressed by the unusual crowding. The ship's sensor logs were disappointing. Nothing unusual had been reported while the crew had been occupied. Plasset IV had yielded nothing new, nothing tangible during the incident, except that the probes that the _Enterprise_ had placed in the planet's atmosphere over the past few days had simultaneously gone silent, dead.

Picard left Riker with the bridge and went to his ready room. At his desk, he called up the last logs of the _U.S.S. Excalibur_ that Starfleet had on record. He read through them for over an hour.

He caught himself yawning at a picture of the _Excalibur_'s bridge crew and he reached to click it off. But he stopped and gave them one last look.

The _Excalibur_ had at one time been critically damaged during a war-game experiment with a computer automated starship. The entire crew had lost, but the ship was salvaged and refitted and assigned a new crew. Another starship crew of Vulcans had been lost in deep space and to fill in the gap Starfleet had assigned a half-human, half-Vulcan crew to the re-built _Excalibur_. The picture on Picard's screen had been posed for Starfleet archives. Picard had sat with his own crew for the same purpose several times and he hated those sessions. Starfleet archivists were fussy and demanding and they made Picard feel like he was on display and they usually put him in a bad mood, so his expression in the final picture would always be a grim and unhappy one.

In the _Excalibur_ picture, Ryder sat in her command chair, her senior staff around her. Most of them were Vulcan; the helm officer, Grennis was the only other Human on the senior staff. Saren, Grennis, T'Gara and the others looked as stiff and formal as statues. Ryder sat smugly in the middle. She had broad shoulders, a generous bust, an hourglass figure and enormous thighs, exposed by the very short, gold dress of the uniform of the day. She hated that uniform. As captain, she had the option of wearing a different style, but Ryder hated that short dress so much that she took perverse pride in wearing it in protest because she knew she looked terrible in it.

Picard knew, from the scattered memory fragments from Plasset IV, that one of Patsy Ryder's last emotions had been anger that she should die as a specter of herself wearing _that_ uniform. The navigator, Polinov, had thought about T'Kathal, who'd just agreed to bond with him. And somewhere else on the ship, T'Kathal had been thinking of Chris Polinov. The Engineer, T'Gara, had only thought about her ship and how it could be made to function, long past the point where its structure had retained any corporeal form.

Picard shut his eyes, mentally backing away from the bits of dying thoughts left behind from Plasset. He flicked off the image on his screen, took a deep breath and sat back in his chair. The _Excalibur_ was unquestionably dead; he could feel the stain of their dying on his memory. But the mark had been left behind on Plasset IV, incorporated into the nebulous beings of that world, who may or may not understand what death really was.

The captain opened his eyes, straightened his uniform and got up. He left Commanders Riker and Data in charge; the ship was progressing back to its usual routine. Picard went back to his quarters.

Picard inspected the rooms again and noted what was broken or damaged, but nothing was missing. He found two crushed plants that he'd missed before in the bedroom. Then he got ready for bed. He got under the covers and automatically looked for his book. It wasn't on the nightstand. Sighing, he tossed the sheets aside and got up. The book had ended up in a corner and he'd put it on the low table in front of the sofa when he'd cleaned up. He picked it up. The bookmark was missing. The door to his quarters opened. Doctor Crusher walked in.

Crusher looked worn out. Her hair was limp and untidy and she didn't smile when she looked at him. She put her medical tricorder on the table where he'd just picked up the book and then took off her medical jacket and laid it over the tricorder. He frowned down at them. Since they'd been staying together, he'd been finding odd medical equipment in his quarters and he'd complained to her about it. Crusher would have them in the pockets of her medical jacket and not find them until she took the jacket off. She ignored his look of disapproval and slowly sat down on the sofa.

"Tired?" he asked.

Crusher nodded brushing her hair back away from her face. Picard sat down next to her.

"There weren't any serious injuries, just a lot of bruises and sprains. And a lot of frightened people." Picard looked at her for a moment, and then two, until his silence prompted her to continue. "I kept thinking about them. It was just so...wrong the way they died."

"It's never right," he amended.

"I know, but...this was different. It wasn't like hearing some statistic about a ship being lost; it was like we knew them."

"They all died long before either of us were born."

Crusher turned to him, as if this was the first time she'd realized this. Then she shook her head. "It doesn't feel that way."

"I know." Crusher felt his hand caress her back, reassuring. Then he got up, went to his desk and came back with a flat notepadd. "I looked up the Starfleet records on the _Excalibur_." He sat down beside her again and activated the screen. Crusher felt an adrenaline chill run through her when she saw the picture. His arm slipped around her waist. "Their last transmission said that they were going to survey this part of the sector. Only two ships were available for the search when the_ Excalibur_ was reported missing and they only used long range scans on the Plasset system."

Crusher closed her eyes and leaned back. Picard shifted his grip around her waist and she leaned her head on his shoulder.

"Captain Ryder had three children," she said, looking at the picture.

"I know." Picard touched a control on the padd with his thumb and the picture changed to text.

"The first officer had a son. The medical officer had a daughter."

"Yes."

"And they didn't have families on starships back then." Crusher closed her eyes.

"No, they didn't." Picard silently read the century old records, the log reports. Then he touched the padd control again and the text changed to the _Excalibur_'s last message. Lieutenant Commander Data, ever efficient, had ordered the ship's computer to record and scan everything that had happened in and around his cabin when the emergency had first begun. The captain stared at the text. He silently mouthed the words as he read them. He hadn't actually listened to or looked at the recording. It was too easy to avoid it so soon after it had happened.

Picard sat for a long time, looking at the words, remembering the cold, red light of Plasset. She sighed, half asleep next to him. His body was warm where Beverly Crusher's touched his. He turned his head, his chin just clearing the top of her head. Red hair. He touched his lips to her and then turning back to the note padd, he clicked it off and put it aside, and then settled himself more comfortably next to Crusher. He'd read it tomorrow.

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><p><strong>* * * * * END * * * * *<strong>

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><p><strong>Note:<strong> This story was written by me and first printed (under the name 'Anne Davenport') after 1993 (not sure of the year), in _King of Infinite Space_ 5, a fanzine back in the hard-copy and snail-mail days of fan-fiction, before the internet really took off.

**Disclaimer:** All Trek characters and the universe belong to Paramount; I'm just playing in that sandbox.


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